The following is a complete transcript of Steven Moffat and
Mark Gatiss' first panel appearance at Sherlocked at the Excel
Centre on Saturday April 25 2015, just after 10:30 in the morning.
The pair formed the first panel at the event, entering the replica
stage set of 221B in typically jovial spirits - with Mark Gatiss
immediately claiming the sofa…

Mark: I'm going to lay down on the sofa as I'm very tired.

Steven: Everything you need to know about our working
relationship - he lies down.

Moderator: There's only two programmes on British TV
that I can think of that could fill a hall like this. And you run
both of them.

Mark: What about Balamory?

Moderator: Oh yeah I forgot about that. Are they still
making that?

Moderator: So, how easy was it, once the pair of you had
that romantic train journey and y'know, through it Sherlock was
born, how easy was it for the BBC to pick this up, and did you know
they were going to do that?

Steven: It happened fairly quickly. We went in to pitch the
idea, and we didn't get further than 'modern day Sherlock Holmes'
and they more or less said 'yes'. So our immaculate and phenomenal
pitch didn't go to waste as we did it anyway. And there was a
moment after the pilot where there was doubt wasn't there?

Mark: Yeah. The straightforward bit was the idea, because
obviously as the most recognisable brand in the world, without
being expensive as it's not period it's a sort of no-brainer. But
there was a little moment after the pilot when we had a few
discussions about various things. They were worried that Sherlock
wasn't very nice, but we were able to say there is precedence, that
these stories are quite successful.

Moderator: Did you have to go away and remake the first
episode?

Steven: It's a complete re-do, yeah. The reason for that was we
made that as a pilot but it was a broadcastable pilot, which is
quite common these days and slightly unfortunate as it's better to
treat a pilot as an experiment, but then Ben Stephenson (now former
BBC Drama commissioner) decided he would like it as three 90s
(minute episodes), a formula that had worked for Wallander, and
oddly enough Mark and I were at Matt Smith's very first readthrough
for Doctor Who - for the first six scripts, just to ease Matt into
it - when we got a phone call from Sue (Vertue) saying "Ben
Stephenson will say yes now if we agree to do it as three 90s. Do
you want to go and discuss that?"

Mark: And we said 'Yeah no, it's fine, do it, yeah.

Steven: And Sue's saying "don't? no? Sure? Just say yes. We'll
work it out later."

Moderator: Were you originally going to have
cliffhangers like Doctor Who? Was that going to be the
formula?

Steven: With the sixty minute version? It would probably have
been six 60s, which is what we were thinking it would be, and I now
think that moving it to ninety... well, it would always have
worked, but moving it to ninety just changed it completely.

Mark: It has a scale to it immediately. I remember watching
Wallander and thinking and thinking you've got a scale, a size to
it, to those stories, a chunkiness to those stories that over six
hours we would have been telling very different Sherlock Holmes
stories I think really, so once we'd made the decision to go to 90s
we sort of rethought the whole thing. We immediately thought about
bringing Moriarty in earlier, bringing Mycroft in, all kinds of
things. It's our own thing about not differing pleasure really,
just kind of getting on with it.

Moderator: So these train trips that you were having,
and fantasizing about 'what if we could?', had you cast Sherlock by
then, or did Benedict audition?

Mark: He did. We had a shortlist of about two hundred and fifty
people, and then Benedict was just the one man. I did a film with
him called Starter for Ten - this is the moment.

(A pause, then cheers from the audience)

Mark: In America, people leave those spaces. (adopts American
accent) "I did a little movie called Starter for Ten."

(Laughter, audience cheers again)

Mark: Thank you. And I knew him a little bit, and Steven and Sue
had just watched The Imitati... no, urm!

Mark: And it was just one of those moments of confluence wasn't
it? He just seemed like the absolutely logical candidate. So he
came in to read, and it was just perfect. And then it took a little
longer to get Martin, in the sense that we saw about six Doctor
Watsons, including Matt Smith, who then became The Doctor at the
end of the week practically, and the chemistry was just immediate
and obvious between them, and Steven leant over to me and said
'there's the show'.

Moderator: It's got a very distinctive feel to it in
terms of direction, graphics coming out. Was this all scripted by
you guys?

Steven: It is now. But the way it began was the very first
episode of the actual series we shot was The Great Game - Mark's
finale - and in The Great Game, there's a hell of a lot of texting
if you remember, a lot of texting, and Paul McGuigan, very clever
man, hates cutting away to a phone. He says it's just a dead shot,
and you always have to have the phone up on camera for ages for the
slowest reader in the audience ever - everyone's fidgeting.

Mark: It's also usually held at a very strange angle so everyone
can see the thing.

Steven: Yeah, and sometimes quite recognisably by not the
actor's hand, it's usually somebody else doing that. So it's
terrible. So he came up with the idea. I remember him saying "I'm
going to put the text on the screen" and I said with my usual
prescience "that sounds shit!" Then I walked past the cutting room
where he was already experimenting with this, and I thought it
looked amazing. I loved it. As I said I always would! But I was
still writing the first one, A Study in Pink, so I started writing
it in, not just for texting but for loads of things, like he's got
an internal heads up display. So by the time Paul got to that
script, he's thinking we'd gone over the top. But that's where it
came from.

Moderator: It's one of the things that stick out from
other TV shows where these things happen.

Mark: I do find when I see a cutaway of a phone now it feels
very old fashioned. A lot of people do it. In House of Cards, David
Fincher does it explicitly because of Sherlock. I think it looks a
bit odd, I think everybody should just do it now, it just saves so
much time.

Steven: Russell (T. Davis) was telling me, I went to the
Cucumber launch, and he was saying "I'm sorry I'm sorry, we've done
the text on screen, I'm sorry I'm sorry!" I said you really are
allowed to, I think it's the convention now. You're welcome, I'll
have £10.

(laughter)

Steven: He gave me the £10, it was great. £10 from David
Fincher? Phone him.

Mark: $10. It's not the same. Also we must say, a huge
contribution to the show was by our editor Charlie Phillips, who
sadly passed away very recently. He was a wonderful man and an
incredible innovator really, so much of that stuff. Charlie was one
of those people you would say "Do you think we could...?" and he'd
say "Yeah, I've done that." And he'd have it in a little file, he'd
just instinctively know how to cover things, he was a wonderful
guy.

Steven: I first met Charlie when I was doing a show called
Jekyll which nobody ever watched.

(Cheers)

Steven: Oh stop it! You liars! He came in as we got into a
terrible confusion about how to cut some sequence together, and I
remember (director) Matt Lipsey saying "I know exactly who can sort
this for us" and that's when I first met Charlie. Charlie arrived
with his toolkit and a whole lot of computers I'd never seen before
and got us out of trouble, and I just thought he was a genius, like
a sort of film boffin. So when Sue had the brilliant idea of
putting Paul McGuigan with Charlie, and the two of them sort of
went mad with each other didn't they? It was a match made in heaven
'cos Paul shoots in an incredibly tricksy way and Charlie edits in
an incredibly tricksy way, and so they were competing with each
other about how bonkers the scene could be. How many wipes, how
many strange ways of cutting from scene to scene there could be. So
an awful lot of what made Sherlock work, and still makes it work as
people pick up these ideas is - and this is a thing that Paul said
- it's got to seem as if Sherlock is behind the camera too. And
Sherlock is a man who sees complexity and darkness everywhere he
looks. You look at something and you see nothing at all, he looks
at it and he sees information and horror in every frame, and that's
what you get from the combination of Paul and Charlie.

Moderator: Now, what essential elements did you both
agree had to be in Sherlock season one, and did you have any
disagreements?

Mark: Well as you know the whole project was born of our
childhood passion for Sherlock Holmes so there are certain
immutable things aren't they? And because we loved the Basil
Rathebone films which had obviously brought them up to the then
present day, if you look at those films there were a lot of clever
people there who were already doing that sort of thing. They do the
bullet holes in the wall which is originally Victoria Regina and
it's the V of a man's lapels, they've thought those things through,
so we had a starting point in a way from other peoples innovations
in the '40s. We knew that obviously he needed to be, that they both
needed to be much younger than they usually are, we were going to
start from the beginning which in itself was very exciting because
it's so rarely done, the first meeting essentially. I remember we
had a sort of little pitch document in which we described him as a
sort of skinny, pale young man who is on the internet all night
poring over criminal records and police morgue photographs and
stuff like that. It's a lot like a lot of people these days.

(Audience laugher)

Mark: But also he's a consulting detective, and there were
certain things that seemed an easy fit and other things we had to
scratch our heads a bit more, the biggest of which was that in
essentially inventing forensic detection was he still relevant in
the 21st Century, and what we decided was although Scotland Yard
now does a lot of the things that Sherlock Holmes did for the first
time as a Victorian, he is still a super brain who can make all the
connections that nobody else can. Once we had decided he still is
relevant because he can judge from the stain on your tie that you
killed someone this morning.

Steven: I remember also one thing we were kind of keen on was
that Sherlock Holmes should be happy in his own skin. He should be
actually someone who quite enjoys his life, because the fashion,
very productively and very brilliantly had come to sort of portray
Sherlock Holmes as a bit of a manic depressive, and happy and -

Mark: Tortured.

Steven: Tortured really. This results in some astonishingly
brilliant work. Robert Stephens and Jeremy Brett give us that kind
of Sherlock Holmes and it is poetic and brilliant. It isn't
actually in the original, he's not really like that, but it's a
brilliant interpretation. But it was time to throw the lever the
other way and say 'actually everyone else might think Sherlock
Holmes is a weird, strange terrifying man, but he's actually quite
happy.' And Sherlock and John dashing around solving crimes
together, they're having the time of their lives. They love it! And
there was a little element - we didn't think of this until we had
finished the first series, and we looked at these two blokes in
their scuzzy flat and we thought 'this is kind of Men Behaving
Badly Solving Crimes.'

(Audience laughter)

Mark: That was the working title.

(Steven laughs)

Moderator: His first scene he's got a riding crop and
he's bashing a corpse...

Steven: Again in the original.

Mark: It's from the original. We had one of our very exciting
train journeys, we were sort of poring over the things which are in
the original stories and which are never done. Some of the things
have become so familiar over the years, and yeah, that's a
description that Stamford gives to Watson before he introduces him
to Sherlock Holmes saying 'y'know, this chap who is looking for a
flat, I found him beating corpses in a dissecting room to assess
the extent of bruising after death.' I remember when I read that I
was about ten I went "WHAT..?"

(Laughter from audience and Steven)

Mark: And it's never done. Thrilling things like that
really.

Steven: We frequently get complimented for innovation that we
simply took from the original. I remember one of the first reviews
said 'as a sop to the modern day, they refer to him as a consulting
detective'. That's EXACTLY how he got described himself in the
original story.

Mark: The war in Afghanistan which was the beginning of it all,
was actually that terrible coincidence that sort of led to the
whole thing.

Moderator: Now supporting characters like Mrs Hudson and
Lestraide...

Mark: Lestrade. (Audience laughter)

Moderator: Lestrade. See I'm just testing
him.

Mark: Schoolboy error.

Steven: We go with the Rathbone pronunciation.

Moderator: Ah, I go with the Douglas Wilmer
pronunciation. You have Douglas Wilmer of course.

Mark: Yes yes, we had Douglas Wilmer in The Diogenes Club,
yes.

Moderator: And of course the BBC via the BFI [have just
released the Wilmer series on DVD]. Anyway, back to Greg and Mrs
Hudson - you've made... Lestraide...

Mark: Lestr-ARDE.

Moderator: Lestrade... very blokeish and very likable,
and again was that a deliberate thing , you had to make him
different from the other
interpretations?

Steven: Well it's actually a difficult one because actually in
Doyle the portrayal of Lestrade varies a bit doesn't it? But we
took our cue from a terrific story called The Six Napoleons, where
Lestrade says to Holmes at the solution of the mystery "you think
we're jealous of you at Scotland Yard, but you're wrong, we admire
you. If you came round to Scotland Yard there isn't a man there who
wouldn't shake your hand and tell you how great you are." So we
took our cue from that, that this is the man who understands how
good Holmes is, is clever enough to recognise that Sherlock Holmes
is cleverer. A really good copper, who really admires Sherlock, and
Sherlock is too much of a dickhead to notice.

(Audience laughter)

Steven: That's the sort of relationship. One of the statements
of that in the first episodes is when John asks Lestrade 'why do
you put up with him?' and he says 'because I think he's a great man
and if we're very lucky one day he might be a good one'. He gets
how amazing Sherlock can be and Sherlock doesn't even notice that
this man admires him. That's the weirdness and the joy in that
relationship.

Mark: It's also that thing we wanted to have a sort of convivial
environment. It's a big mistake to think that everyone has to be
rowing all the time. They wouldn't stay together as a unit if they
didn't actually like each other. Obviously, especially John and
Sherlock have big moments and flare ups and proper rows because
Sherlock is unbearable, but we wanted people around them to
actually want to be with them. And also we said with casting Rupert
it was like if Sherlock wasn't around it would sort of be his show.
He's the best detective Scotland Yard's got - that's what Sherlock
says about him in the original stories, so to get away from this
sort of more ratty faced and gnarky Lestrade it was about trying to
do something different with it. And as with Mrs Hudson who has
become a big character by dint of all the dramatisations, in the
stories is a ghost, there's hardly any detail, so over the years
we've developed quite an elaborate back story for Una.

Moderator: Yeah, she's running a drug cartel and pole
dancing.

Mark: That was her husband. Well, not the pole dancing.

Steven: She was typing.

Moderator: How did you decide the three stories you did
choose for season one, because one would have thought Baskerville
would have been on there instantly?

Mark: Well, they weren't tentative, but the obvious thing was to
start with the first one because Study in Scarlet is rarely done,
and the beats follow the story very closely, it's an expanded
version. And then we sort of wanted to do a kind of code one, so we
asked Steve Thompson to do The Blind Banker which is a bit like The
Dancing Men but only in the sense of a sort of code. And then we
knew we were bringing in Moriarty, so my favourite story is The
Bruce Partington Plans which is one of the stories in The Great
Game but again it's to do with the 90 minute format, we had to
explode them and do lots of original stuff around them. It was
really when we go to the second series we thought 'let's just do
the three most famous ones.'

Moderator: Now every hero needs a villain, and Holmes
has got a great main villain in Moriarty. Casting, you went for
somebody relatively the same age. Now I remember seeing you in an
interview saying the Sidney Paget [illustration of] Moriarty looked
like an old bank manager.

Steven: He does, but that's not a criticism actually, it sounds
like one. One of the problems with Moriarty, in terms of the
original, is that Doyle wrote the master villain so well absolutely
everybody copied Moriarty. You read that scene in The Final Problem
when Holmes and Moriarty meet and it is every Bond film right
there. Because that character was so relentlessly imitated, largely
by Ian Fleming, it would be a cliche to do it again. We had to go a
different way. Oh, we didn't have to, we decided to. We thought we
could be surprising. In Victorian times the idea of organised crime
was new. That was a terrifying new thing - 'what if crime were
organised?' - so a crime boss like Moriarty was a new terror of the
age. We thought 'can we make a Moriarty who is more like a suicide
bomber?' because that's the terror of our age, a man so deranged,
and so bored and so evil that he'd even kill himself to win. We
thought that's the terror of our age.

Mark: The key thing really was casting Andrew, because that was
all formulated but he was just incredible and everything about it
came together in that performance really. The sort of charm and
then the absolute derangement.

Moderator: Can geniuses be insane though? Because that
final meeting between them on the roof, can villains as clever as
that be insane?

Steven: Well, can there be amateur private detectives who are
consulted by the police? You know, we are in Sherlock Holmes land,
we've never really claimed it is an exact and accurate portrayal of
contemporary Britain (laughs).

Moderator: It also snows on Christmas Day on Baker
Street so it's proof that we're not there. Now, Molly's boyfriend.
That poor man.

Steven: Are you referring to Jim Moriarty?

Moderator: Er, yes. Oh no, the one from season
three.

Mark: Oh, Tom!

Steven: Because I do think the big question really that hangs
over Sherlock is - did Molly...

Moderator: Yeah, that's what I was trying to say. I knew
you'd bring that up...

Steven: I mean, did she?

Moderator: Do you think they did?

Steven: Well I don't know, I just think it's a really, really
dreadful thing to think about this lovely woman who is a bit in
love with Sherlock Holmes accidentally shagging Moriarty.

(Huge laughter from the audience)

Steven: How do you cope with that when you go home at night?

(Applause and cheers)

Steven: I mean, if she ever - which she won't let's be honest -
got it away with Sherlock, how's she going to bring that up? "You
know your archenemy? Well..." (laughs) "You're better." We're not
going to do that episode, relax.

Moderator: Now, the relationship between Sherlock and
Mycroft blossomed from season one all the way through to season
three, and watching them all over the course of three days, I think
Mycroft is a smashing big brother.

Mark: Thank you very much.

(Applause and cheers)

Moderator: He really does genuinely care for
Sherlock.

Mark: Well yes of course, that's the thing I was saying before.
We took our cue from the Billy Wilder / I.A.L. Diamond film The
Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, in which Sherlock and Mycroft's
relationship is much spikier, but even there, even in that
chilliness, there is a great sense of care. There's a beautiful bit
at the end where Christopher Lee writes to Robert Stephens, and you
know it's very reserved but it's clearly coming from the right
place. Essentially the idea is that Mycroft is this sort of ice man
and he has sort of taught his big brother how to remove emotional
connections and he has succeeded, Sherlock has not succeeded, and I
think Mycroft constantly wants him to be more like him, to come
inside the tent and be one of us, you know. Which he is never going
to be. But it comes from a place of love, of course it does,
yeah.

Moderator: Of course it's when he's pouring tea and says
"I'll be mother" and Sherlock says "Well there lies the root of the
problem."

Mark: Yeah.

Moderator: Now, we've got ten more minutes. If anyone
wants to ask a question this is you moment.

Audience Question 1: Hello Mark.

Mark: Hello.

Audience Question 1: Hi. Hello Steven.

Steven: Huh?

Mark: Hi Steven.

Steven: Hello!

Audience Question 1: Question for you both. In
Reichenbach, when Sherlock was on the roof, underneath is the word
'Pathological'. Was that by design or accident?

Mark: No it's just on the building! I remember thinking at the
time - it's the old pathology department of Bart's Hospital - I
remember thinking 'well that's rather good', but no. We get a lot
of questions like this about what's written on the road and things.
We had about three hours to shoot that, there's no way we could
stop the whole of London and repaint it, so it's just a coincidence
I'm afraid. But it's quite a good one!

Audience Question 2: Hi, I'm from Russia, I would like
first to thank you for the show, and I would like to ask you about
Mary Morstan because I would like to know how you would describe
her relationship with Sherlock, because they seem very brother and
sister like?

Steven: I think the idea.... again, we're always guided by
Doyle. Don't know better than Doyle. In the original, Sherlock
Holmes and Mary Morstan get on perfectly well. Where she has turned
up rather infrequently in the movie versions, they've always had a
spiky relationship, but why would they? There's no reason for them
to. So we really liked the idea that Sherlock immediately takes to
Mary, and Mary immediately takes to him in a way that's slightly
irritating for John. We had loads of stuff that we never even used,
we had ideas that she'd go around for violin lessons and John
wouldn't know about it, and things like that. So they're just great
friends.

Mark: I think it's interesting that it's because in fact he does
care about her, and likes her, it slightly clouds his judgement and
he doesn't really get what she's up to, which sort of proves my
point, hahahaha.

(Audience laughter)

Steven: It's an interesting thing, that's what Mark said when I
was starting to write A Scandal in Belgravia, Mark said "what if
Sherlock is simply right, what if he is simply correct in what he
says - emotion, affection, love, desire, clouds his judgement and
he must stay away from them." And that was the key to all of that,
key to both Irene and Mary, is the moment Sherlock's affections are
engaged he becomes utterly useless. He doesn't notice the obvious
about Mary, he spends most of Scandal wandering around like a
mortal doofus. And suddenly I'll write a Sherlock Holmes story
where Sherlock does something useful, I'm going to do it next time
I promise! But it's just interesting. He's right. Affection is
something he can't let into his brain.

Audience Question 3: Hi! If you could have any actor
feature in later episodes of Sherlock who would you
have?

Mark: Angela Lansbury.

(Laughter, applause and huge cheers)

Mark: Who is my new friend, my new friend Angela. I gave the
Olivier award to Angela last week and it was AMAZING. She's
amazing. That's my answer today.

Steven: I can't top that answer, I think that's a brilliant
answer.

Audience Question 4: Hello! Greetings from Italy! I have
a question for you both. First I would like to tell you I think
Sherlock is a beautiful treatment to the city of London and it made
me fall in love with the city. Secondly I very appreciated the
frequency of references to the novels, also in little details like
The Bruce Partington Plans, and I wanted to ask you, what is the
process of inserting these references into the main
plot?

Steven: Well there's no process, we're just fanboys getting away
with it really, over two shows, let's be honest. No, we just like
it. I mean there's one we love slipping in the references that
Sherlock Holmes fans will get. Sue will pull us back if we're doing
too much. The other thing is as Mark said earlier, there's so much
beautiful stuff in Doyle that nobody ever touches, that we get a
particular pleasure from finding a nugget of the original that
people don't know about.

Mark: We don't really insert things in that way because it tends
to be more organic, but there are occasions where there's some
situation where you go... I mean, I've mined A Case of Identity I
think three times because it's a beautiful little story, a quite
fragile little story, it's got these little nuggets of things, like
the woman oscillating on the street about whether to ring, so
gorgeous isn't it? We just needed a little glimpse of a previous
case and it was so perfect. Sometimes like that.

Audience Question 5: First of all I want to thank you
for hiring Benedict Cumberbatch because he's just an amazing
revolution.

(Cheers and applause)

Mark: He pays us now.

Audience Question 5: Good thinking. And also because
this is a dream come true, because I always wanted to ask
you...

Mark: Strange dream...

Audience Question 5: I know. I have a lot of them. After
watching the unaired pilot, I wanted to know what sort of thought
processes went into the differences between that and the one that
aired, because they're very subtle but they're also very obvious. I
would have watched the unaired pilot as a series but compared to
what aired it was like a rough draft, and I just wanted to know how
you went about making those changes.

Steven: Is this the point at which you normally wake up?

Audience Question 5: Yes, because I don't have an
answer!

Mark: This is where the giant green monster comes out. Well
there were lots of things because you don't normally get a chance
to do it, you suddenly think, 'right, there are some things I
didn't like.' I didn't like how Mrs Hudson owning the shop next
door worked out, uh, I pulled Benedict's trousers up which drove me
crazy because they were sort of concertinaring at the bottom, he
didn't look smart enough I thought. But often the more fundamental
things, once we knew we were going to a 90, it was about whether we
bring up certain things like Moriarty which would have happened
late into episode six if we'd done that series, and bringing
Mycroft in there and stuff like that. There were lots of little
things weren't there? And really, fundamentally I think, bringing
Paul and Charlie together made the whole thing look so cinematic
and exceptional really, that was the major difference.

Steven: In fairness to that pilot which tends to get a rough
ride, when people watch that without seeing the series they thought
it was GREAT. It was only when you saw we made that pilot the very
first time we made Sherlock and didn't really know what we were
doing, which is always the case at the beginning, then, when we
made it again with Paula and Charlie now onboard that was the
fourth time round, as Study in Pink was made at the end of the
first series. So the amount we'd learned was huge. I mean, the
differences are mostly getting better at it. The truth about pilots
is they should never be broadcast, you should always be allowed a
big old go at it, and then be allowed to do it again. Nobody ever
likes to shoot their first episode first because you haven't
learned to do it yet.

Moderator: I'm afraid time has run out. So please raise
the roof for Steven Moffat and Mark
Gatiss!